Bringing Down Tuition: How to Look Past College’s High Sticker Price
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Here's your Money Briefing for Tuesday, April 26th. I'm J.R. Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. It's Student Debt Week on the show, our week-long look at taking on, managing, and eventually repaying student debt. Today's all about financial aid. The high cost of attending some of the nation's top private colleges and universities might scare some lower- and middle-income families away from even applying. But it turns out many of these schools may actually be within their financial reach.
It's important for people to research the kind of financial aid that a school gives if they're thinking about applying to it. Don't assume that the dream school is unaffordable.
On today's show, we'll be joined by reporter Andrea Fuller. She specializes in data analysis and co-wrote the WSJ's Guide to Student Loans. We'll talk with her about how to comparison shop and find the best deal for a quality college. That's after the break.
This podcast is brought to you by ReliaQuest. Cyber criminals are constantly attacking. They want your data. They want your identity. They want your innovation. ReliaQuest fortifies your business with agentic defense, AI that detects, contains, and eliminates cyber threats in minutes. It helps your security team move faster at the work that matters most to protect the business now and delivers insights to help them predict what's next. ReliaQuest, agentic defense for the enterprise. Learn more at ReliaQuest.com. That's R-E-L-I-A-Q-U-E-S-T.com.
So you've had the talk about how to pay for college, and you and your soon-to-be college students start looking around for schools.
How does the episode introduce Student Debt Week and today's focus on financial aid?
You look at the ratings, the programs, the facilities, and then you see the sticker price. Well, after picking yourself up off the floor, what next? Do you move on, or are there ways of getting that top line number down a bit to make it more affordable? WSJ reporter Andrea Fuller has looked into this, and she joins me now. Andrea, thank you so much for being with us.
Thanks for having me.
So, you know, Andrea, yesterday we talked about how when you're thinking about the financial side of college, it's important to set the right expectations for the get-go. But if you think about a student loan from the perspective of a lower or middle-income family who really wants to go to a top private college, they might see that the cost could be over $80,000 a year, which is not unheard of. And they might just throw up their hands and say, well, there's no way I could afford that.
Yeah, absolutely. And they shouldn't. That's a common reaction. People box themselves out from even applying to these expensive schools because they have this high sticker price. But actually, families should consider that they actually might be eligible for financial aid at these schools, whether it's need-based aid based on their family income or merit-based aid based on scholarships. They shouldn't totally say, oh, this school costs $80,000 a year. There's no way we could afford that. the net price is actually often much, much lower than the sticker price. And families can research this. They can look at something called the Common Data Set, which a lot of schools publish. They publish their average scholarship amount.
They can also look at something called College Navigator or the College Scorecard to find more information about the net price that students actually end up paying students. The government actually has schools release it by income band. What's the net price for families earning less than $50,000 a year?
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